Civilization V Quotes

Background

With a new Civilization game out from Firaxis, there comes a new round of quotes. As with almost every game in the series, a quote is given whenever a major event happens (such as a new technology researched or entering a new era). The quotes are as wide ranging as the scope of the game as it spans from every culture and every era in the history of the world. In Civilization V, I found the quotes the development team chose to be exceptional. However, I could not find a single collection of them online so I began to look elsewhere for them. Luckily for me, the vast majority of the game data can be found in XML files in the game’s installation directory. With a bit of data-mining, I was able to successfully extract them with little effort.

ERA INDUSTRIAL2: “If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.” – Mark Twain

ERA INDUSTRIAL3: “The day of small nations has long passed away. The day of Empires has come.” – Joseph Chamberlain

ERA MEDIEVAL1: “An emperor is subject to no one but God and Justice.” – Frederick I, Barbarossa

ERA MEDIEVAL2: “This life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant.” – Venerable Bede

ERA MEDIEVAL3: “The voice of the people is the voice of God.” – Alcuin

ERA MODERN1: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” – Franklin Delano Roosevelt

ERA MODERN2: “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” – Joseph Stalin

ERA MODERN3: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” – Ronald Reagan

ERA RENAISSANCE1: “Whoever desires to found a state and give it laws, must start with assuming that all men are bad and ever ready to display their vicious nature, whenever they may find occasion for it.” – Niccolo Machiavelli

ERA RENAISSANCE2: “In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” – Desiderius Erasmus

ERA RENAISSANCE3: “Do you not know, my son, with what little understanding the world is ruled?” – Pope Julius III

TECH ACOUSTICS: “Their rising all at once was as the sound of thunder heard remote.” – Milton

TECH BANKING: “Happiness: a good bank account, a good cook and a good digestion.” – Jean Jacques Rousseau

TECH BIOLOGY: “If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn’t.” – Lyall Watson

TECH BRONZE WORKING: “Here Hector entered, with a spear eleven cubits long in his hand; the bronze point gleamed in front of him, and was fastened to the shaft of the spear by a ring of gold.” – Homer

TECH CALCULUS: “In the fall of 1972 President Nixon announced that the rate of increase of inflation was decreasing. This was the first time that a sitting president used the third derivative to advance his case for reelection.” – Hugo Rossi

TECH CALENDAR: “So teach us to number our days, so that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.” – The Bible, Psalms, 90:12

TECH CHEMISTRY: “Wherever we look, the work of the chemist has raised the level of our civilization and has increased the productive capacity of the nation.” – Calvin Coolidge

TECH CHIVALRY: “Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil, is rightwise king born of all England.” – Malory

TECH CIVIL SERVICE: “The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is its inefficiency.” – Eugene McCarthy

TECH COMBUSTION: “Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves.” – Albert Einstein

TECH COMPUTERS: “Computers are like Old Testament gods: lots of rules and no mercy.” – Joseph Campbell

TECH CONSTRUCTION: “Three things are to be looked to in a building: that it stand on the right spot; that it be securely founded; that it be successfully executed.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

TECH CURRENCY: “Better is bread with a happy heart Than wealth with vexation.” – Amenemope

TECH DYNAMITE: “As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy.” – Christopher Dawson

TECH ECOLOGY: “Only within the moment of time represented by the present century as one species, man, acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world.” – Rachel Carson

TECH ECONOMICS: “Compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe.” – Albert Einstein

TECH EDUCATION: “Education is the best provision for old age.” – Aristotle

TECH ELECTRICITY: “Is it a fact – or have I dreamt it – that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time?” – Nathaniel Hawthorne

TECH ELECTRONICS: “There’s a basic principle about consumer electronics: it gets more powerful all the time and it gets cheaper all the time.” – Trip Hawkins

TECH ENGINEERING: “Instrumental or mechanical science is the noblest and, above all others, the most useful.” – Leonardo da Vinci

TECH RADIO: “The whole country was tied together by radio. We all experienced the same heroes and comedians and singers. They were giants.” – Woody Allen

TECH RAILROAD: “The introduction of so powerful an agent as steam to a carriage on wheels will make a great change in the situation of man.” – Thomas Jefferson

TECH REFRIGERATION: “And homeless near a thousand homes I stood, and near a thousand tables pined and wanted food.” – William Wordsworth

TECH REPLACEABLE PARTS: “Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.” – Henry Ford

TECH RIFLING: “It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.” – Robert E. Lee

TECH ROBOTICS: “1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except when such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.” – Isaac Asimov

TECH ROCKETRY: “A good rule for rocket experimenters to follow is this: always assume that it will explode.” – Astronautics Magazine, 1937

TECH SAILING: “He who commands the sea has command of everything.” – Themistocles

TECH SCIENTIFIC THEORY: “Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.” – John Dewey

TECH STEALTH: “Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent’s fate.” – Sun Tzu

TECH STEAM POWER: “The nations of the West hope that by means of steam communication all the world will become as one family.” – Townsend Harris

TECH STEEL: John Henry said to his Captain, “‘A man ain’t nothin’ but a man, And before I’ll let your steam drill beat me down, I’ll die with the hammer in my hand.'” – Anonymous: The Ballad of John Henry, the Steel-Drivin’ Man

TECH TELEGRAPH: “I once sent a dozen of my friends a telegram saying ‘flee at once – all is discovered.’ They all left town immediately.” – Mark Twain

TECH THE WHEEL: “Wisdom and virtue are like the two wheels of a cart.” – Japanese Proverb

TECH THEOLOGY: “Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do.” – St. Thomas Aquinas

TECH TRAPPING: “Even brute beasts and wandering birds do not fall into the same traps or nets twice.” – Saint Jerome

TECH WRITING: “He who destroys a good book kills reason itself.” – John Milton

WONDER ANGKORWAT: “The temple is like no other building in the world. It has towers and decoration and all the refinements which the human genius can conceive of.” – Antonio da Magdalena

WONDER BIGBEN: “To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.” – Leonard Bernstein

WONDER BRANDENBURGGATE: “Pale Death beats equally at the poor man’s gate and at the palaces of kings.” – Horace

WONDER CHICHENITZA: “The katun is established at Chichen Itza. The settlement of the Itza shall take place there. The quetzal shall come, the green bird shall come. Ah Kantenal shall come. It is the word of God. The Itza shall come.” – The Books of Chilam Balam

WONDER COLOSSUS: “Why man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a colossus; and we petty men walk under his huge legs, and peep about to find ourselves dishonorable graves.” – William Shakespeare: Julius Caesar

WONDER CRISTOREDENTOR: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy burdened, and I will give you rest.” – The Bible, Matthew 25:28

WONDER EIFFELTOWER: “We live only to discover beauty. All else is a form of waiting.” – Kahlil Gibran

WONDER FORBIDDENPALACE: “Most of us can, as we choose, make of this world either a palace or a prison.” – John Lubbock

WONDER GREATLIBRARY: “Libraries are as the shrine where all the relics of the ancient saints, full of true virtue, and all that without delusion or imposture are preserved and reposed.” – Sir Francis Bacon

WONDER GREATLIGHTHOUSE: “They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; these see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.” – The Bible, Psalms 107:23-24

WONDER GREATWALL: “The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy’s… not attacking, but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable.” – Sun Tzu

WONDER HAGIASOPHIA: “For it soars to a height to match the sky, and as if surging up from amongst the other buildings it stands on high and looks down upon the remainder of the city, adorning it, because it is a part of it, but glorying in its own beauty.” – Procopius, De Aedificis

WONDER HANGINGGARDENS: “I think that if ever a mortal heard the word of God it would be in a garden at the cool of the day.” – F. Frankfort Moore

WONDER HIMEJICASTLE: “Bushido is realized in the presence of death. This means choosing death whenever there is a choice between life and death. There is no other reasoning.” – Yamamoto Tsunetomo

WONDER KREMLIN: “The Law is a fortress on a hill that armies cannot take or floods wash away.” – The Prophet Muhammed

WONDER LOUVRE: “Every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

WONDER MACHUPICCHU: “Few romances can ever surpass that of the granite citadel on top of the beetling precipices of Machu Picchu, the crown of Inca Land.” – Hiram Bingham

WONDER NOTREDAME: “Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.” – Victor Hugo

WONDER ORACLE: “The ancient Oracle said that I was the wisest of all the Greeks. It is because I alone, of all the Greeks, know that I know nothing.” – Socrates

WONDER PENTAGON: “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensible.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower

WONDER PORCELAINTOWER: “Things always seem fairer when we look back at them, and it is out of that inaccessible tower of the past that Longing leans and beckons.” – James Russell Lowell

WONDER PYRAMIDS: “O, let not the pains of death which come upon thee enter into my body. I am the god Tem, and I am in the foremost part of the sky, and the power which protecteth me is that which is with all the gods forever.” – The Book of the Dead, translated by Sir Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge